Man Down!

The other day I was experiencing issues with my Mac Pro, it would lockup when I would open up Lightroom. I thought that it was quite strange considering that OSx would freeze, but I could move my mouse around freely. I didn’t know what was causing the issue so I started at the Disk Utility application in OSX. From there I discovered that one of the drives of my RAID 1 has failed. Could this of been the culprit? Quite possible because when I remove the drives from the Mac Pro I don’t experience any more lock ups.

After pulling the hard drives I went to Seagate’s website to check on the warranty. Turns out that the hard drives only had 2 years (WTF!) and I was out of luck as it was out of warranty. I even wrote a blog post about adding a RAID 1 to my Mac Pro 2 years ago.

So now I have a choice, do I buy an identical Seagate hard drive to rebuild the RAID 1 or do I buy another set of 2 hard drives from another manufacturer?

Before I just buy a replacement I wanted to do a little due diligence and see what other users have experienced with this hard drive. To my dismay I’m not the only one that has issues particularly with this model. Remembering back when I placed the order, hard drive prices skyrocketed compared to a year ago. At that time the flooding in Thailand affected the supply and these were reasonably priced for a 3TB hard drive. Little did I know that buying based on price would eventually come back to haunt me. In my research I came across this blog post from Backblaze, a very comprehensive analysis of Seagate’s 3TB hard drives, model ST3000DM001.

This got me thinking. Hard drives are going to fail, there’s is no doubt about that. However I want to have some confidence knowing that my hard drives have a proven track record. And at the rate Seagate’s ST3000DM001 model isn’t doing that for me.

So for now I’m on a search for a reliable hard drives because that remaining Seagate is a ticking time bomb that is about to self destruct. Also thanks to Backblaze for publishing their quarterly Hard Drive Reliability Stats, it certainly helps folks like myself in making the right decision. Cause lets face it, hard drives lives do matter.